George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.
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Some persons, by hating vice too much, come to love men too little. Hatred is self-punishment. Hatred is the cowards revenge for being intimidated.
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The only power a god can teach is the power of doing without happiness.
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Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since.
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Rich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity.
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We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
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God's trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honour and high public spirit.
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What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
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If more than 10% of the people like a painting, you can be sure it's bad.
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The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
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The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.
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What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.
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What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.
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The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
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Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.
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A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.
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I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.
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When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
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My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God - nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?
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Be like the sun and meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.
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The theory that music has a depraving effect on morals has now been abandoned to the old women of both sexes.
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A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.
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Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
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To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.